Why am I charged for memory and chapters?

Long journeys stay coherent because Imagina does a little bookkeeping in the background while you play. Two of those background tasks, journey memory and chapters, cost a small amount of credits, and they show up in your credit history as lines like "Journey memory: turns 21-26" or "Chapter 3: The Road South". This page explains what you are paying for.

What journey memory is

The storyteller can only re-read so much of your story on every turn. Past a certain length, older turns scroll out of its working view. Journey memory is how nothing important gets lost: as you play, Imagina writes down the durable facts of your story (promises made, relationships changed, injuries taken, secrets uncovered, milestones reached) and keeps them in a long-term memory the storyteller consults on every turn. A detail from turn 40 can still shape turn 400.

It also reads the world's authored lore while it works, so it does not waste memory restating what the world already establishes. Memory is reserved for what happened in your journey.

You can see and manage all of it yourself. Open Memory (the brain icon) in the play header:

• Memories lists everything the story wrote down, newest first, each with the turn it was formed on. You can correct a memory in place, or tell the story to forget it. A forgotten memory never comes back on its own.
• Story canon shows the derived shape of the journey: the cast being tracked, the threads still open, and the places the story knows about.
• The remaining panes show your trackers and the standing rules the story is being told under.

Why memory costs credits

Writing memories is real AI work: a small model reads your recent turns and decides what is worth keeping. To keep the cost tiny, it never runs on every turn. It waits until about half a dozen turns have piled up, then processes them in one background batch. In your credit history this appears as one line per batch, "Journey memory: turns X-Y", and it usually costs 1 credit, so roughly 1 credit every 6 turns.

A few guarantees:

• It never interrupts or delays your turn. It runs quietly after your turn is already on screen.
• Your free credits are spent first, like everywhere else.
• If your balance cannot cover it, you are charged only what you have (even nothing) and the memory is still written. Memory never blocks on billing.
• Journeys that predate the memory feature start remembering from the present. You are never billed retroactively for old turns.

Why chapters cost credits

Chapters are the automatic table of contents of your Storybook: as your story moves on, finished stretches are sealed into chapters, each with a title and a short summary. Sealing a chapter is one more small background call, billed the same best-effort way, and works out to roughly 1 credit every 12 turns. The credit line reads like "Chapter 3: The Road South". See How do chapters and the Storybook work? for everything the Storybook can do.

What it adds up to

Between the two, a long journey accrues around 2 to 3 extra credits per dozen turns, small next to the cost of the turns themselves. Both tasks are part of how every journey works: they are always on, cannot be turned off, and are what keeps a hundred-turn story feeling like one continuous world instead of a story that forgets its own past.